25/08/2009

Academy Award winning British director and ardent cricket fan Sam Mendes will direct the film adaptation of Joseph O’Neill’s acclaimed novel Netherland. BAFTA and Academy Award winning screenwriter Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) has signed up to adapt the novel for the screen.

The novel follows Hans van den Broek, a Dutch stockbroker who moves from London to post 9/11 New York with his wife and upon being estranged from her finds solace along with a group of expatriates in the game of cricket. This is not dissimilar to Irish born, Dutch-raised, England-educated and New York based O’Neill’s own life. Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films optioned the book, which won the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

O’Neill has said about the book, “I love sport and play cricket and golf myself. Sport is a wonderful way to bring together people who would otherwise have no connection to each other. This is not a novel of eventful twists and turns. It is more like a long-form international cricket match (which can last for 5 days without a winner emerging), about nuance and ambiguity and small slippages of insight.”

The last cricket themed film to make an impact was Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001), which was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award and won the Audience Award at Locarno.

Mendes’ latest film, Away We Go, is due to release in the UK on September 18. He has a raft of films in development, including Butcher’s Crossing, Preacher, Middlemarch and Lost in Austen.